Solutions to the challenge of fire safety are discussed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,900,709, and U.S. patent application Ser. Nos. 11/183,948 and 12/079,224 (all of which are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety). U.S. Pat. No. 7,900,709, and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/183,948 and U.S. Ser. No. 12/079,224 describe establishing a hypoxic fire-preventive environment in different compartments of an aircraft during its operation.
The concept of inerting aircraft fuel tanks with hypoxic air up to 12% oxygen content has been adopted by the aviation community. The FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) requires installation of such systems for fuel tank protection on all commercial airplanes, which illustrates a practical implementation of the solutions provided in the patent and applications disclosed above.
However, all currently proposed systems require compressed air for feeding of an air separation device that produces hypoxic air for inerting of the fuel tanks. This requires energy and additional fuel has to get burned on the aircraft, which cost money and provides a negative impact on the Earth's atmosphere.